Ed Mann Walking

This strip is another jarring example (I think) of how far we’ve come since we started EMW in January. When viewed next to the very first strip we put up, it doesn’t even look like the same comic. That’s not to say it’s perfect or that we don’t have a long way to go, because we do- but the undeniable progress is pretty satisfying.

On a completely unrelated note, we have two cats. The female sometimes eats too fast, doesn’t chew, and winds up puking. But she doesn’t just barf once and get it over with. It comes in spurts. So by the time you’ve found the first pile, she’s already around the corner starting on the second pile.

To make matters worse, our male cat’s immediate reaction to the sound of her heaving is: “I HAVE TO EAT THAT NOW!” and off he goes licking it up. He’s also always one pile ahead of me so it’s hard to stop him. Now the piles of kitty puke look just like their kibble (just slimier). I want to reason with the male cat that he has two bowls of regular kibble a few steps from him. He doesn’t need to settle for the vomit glazed variety. But you can’t reason with a cat. You just look like an asshole when you try to.

I just don’t understand his urgency. Is it not as delicious when it’s no longer hot? Does he know he only has precious seconds before I wipe it up? *starts playing Unsolved Mysteries theme* I need to know!

Cats. WTF?

We’ll see you next week!

I can’t tell you how many conversations Kristen and I had about buying another external hard drive for the sole purpose of backing up all of the EMW media. It was just something we knew that we inevitably had to follow through on. For some reason it didn’t feel that urgent though. Even with 30+ comics (both the gigantic photoshop files and the scaled down web versions), our growing catalog was barely making a dent on my hard drive space.

Then one day I got the famous blue screen of death. I’ve never had one on any computer I’ve ever owned. I read up on it and figured out what I thought was the problem. My hard drive had two partitions. The one Ed was stored on was nearly empty. The other one was almost at capacity and I assumed the operating system was having trouble booting and running because of this. So I cleared EVERYTHING out. For a few days the machine was running better than it ever had. Then, just like that- kaput.

I lost a great deal of work other than our comics. Luckily I have a separate and much faster computer I use for video editing so our other projects were fine, but I’m still coming to terms with all of the stuff I’ll never be able to replace. It would have cost an insane amount of money to even try to fix it. So I still would have been billed even if they couldn’t find or repair the exact problem. It just didn’t make sense. So they offered me a refurbished machine and even gave me my old one back in case I wanted someone else to take a look at it and reaffirm their diagnosis.

*sigh*

I remember considering opening a gmail account just to send myself the photoshop files as backup until we got that external drive. It was just one of those things I perpetually kept telling myself I’d do tomorrow. All things considered, better that it happened so early on than after years and years worth of work. Thanks for your patience while we found our footing again. I had to rebuild our setup from scratch and although it devastated me to skip last week’s update, we really didn’t have a choice.

Lessons learned. But we’re back, the prelude’s winding down, and the next chapter is going to be insane. See you next week!